Tuesday, November 02, 2004, 22:39 GMT
Estuary English, in my opinion, has really developed through the final demise of the class system in England.
At one time accent had a direct correlation with class and social status in ENGLAND, but not in Scotland or Wales. In the Celtic fringe it was never an issue, so we in those areas tended to think England and the English were riddled with snobbery, and an English person would immediately judge another from the way he/she spoke. That has not really been the case in Scotland at all...even though Edinburgh does look down a bit on the Glasgow accent, come to think of it, but certainly not in the English sense.
It was through this, for instance, that George Bernard Shaw wrote "Pygmalion", with wee Eliza Doolittle switching from broad Cockney to upper class English which allowed her to circulate in the higher echelons of English society. The film "My Fair Lady" was adapted from the book.
By the 1980's in England a slow move away from RP took place, starting in the London/Thames Estuary area of England and the fashionable trend was to "dumb down" the accent and combine RP with a form of London Cockney (nicknamed Mockney).
Estuary was born, and it was first called that in 1984 by a guy called David Rosewarne. So to be trendy was to adopt Estuary. It started off as a sort of teen-speak but quickly became the standard way of speaking by most people in the age group up to about 30, including the trendsetters moving into all the fashionable developments sprouting up all over London and the South East. High flyers living in newly developed Docklands spoke Estuary doing multi million pound deals in their jobs in the City (the financial centre of London).
RP quickly became seen as a "posh" accent and regarded as old fashioned and fuddy-duddy and increasingly people switched to Estuary in order to appear more "normal" and not still part of some old fashioned class based system that was seen as very outmoded.
It looks as if Estuary is here to stay and spreading relentlessly, so that many people are convinced it will become the new RP of England, certainly in the South of England and most of the Midlands and East Anglia and down into the West Country. Speaking with a posh RP accent is now regarded as a handicap, certainly socially in England.
Scottish and Welsh accents are in a totally different scenario and unaffected by the "English situation". I can't see the Estuary tide lapping at the shores of Scotland and Wales though, not in the immediate future anyway. Although even here glottal stops are part of the linguistic scene....certainly in Edinburgh, which has always been trendy anyway! ;-)
At one time accent had a direct correlation with class and social status in ENGLAND, but not in Scotland or Wales. In the Celtic fringe it was never an issue, so we in those areas tended to think England and the English were riddled with snobbery, and an English person would immediately judge another from the way he/she spoke. That has not really been the case in Scotland at all...even though Edinburgh does look down a bit on the Glasgow accent, come to think of it, but certainly not in the English sense.
It was through this, for instance, that George Bernard Shaw wrote "Pygmalion", with wee Eliza Doolittle switching from broad Cockney to upper class English which allowed her to circulate in the higher echelons of English society. The film "My Fair Lady" was adapted from the book.
By the 1980's in England a slow move away from RP took place, starting in the London/Thames Estuary area of England and the fashionable trend was to "dumb down" the accent and combine RP with a form of London Cockney (nicknamed Mockney).
Estuary was born, and it was first called that in 1984 by a guy called David Rosewarne. So to be trendy was to adopt Estuary. It started off as a sort of teen-speak but quickly became the standard way of speaking by most people in the age group up to about 30, including the trendsetters moving into all the fashionable developments sprouting up all over London and the South East. High flyers living in newly developed Docklands spoke Estuary doing multi million pound deals in their jobs in the City (the financial centre of London).
RP quickly became seen as a "posh" accent and regarded as old fashioned and fuddy-duddy and increasingly people switched to Estuary in order to appear more "normal" and not still part of some old fashioned class based system that was seen as very outmoded.
It looks as if Estuary is here to stay and spreading relentlessly, so that many people are convinced it will become the new RP of England, certainly in the South of England and most of the Midlands and East Anglia and down into the West Country. Speaking with a posh RP accent is now regarded as a handicap, certainly socially in England.
Scottish and Welsh accents are in a totally different scenario and unaffected by the "English situation". I can't see the Estuary tide lapping at the shores of Scotland and Wales though, not in the immediate future anyway. Although even here glottal stops are part of the linguistic scene....certainly in Edinburgh, which has always been trendy anyway! ;-)